<Begin Segment 23>

AH: Suicide is something that I'm fairly close to myself, having been married to a woman whose father committed suicide and her having a brother who attempted to commit suicide. And I've read enough about people in families sometimes famous like Ernest Hemingway where suicide runs through three or four generations. And I'm wondering about yourself, when you sort of think about the personality dynamics that go into when does a person sort of take their own life? And you're the inheritor of something culturally and through the family and stuff. What are your thoughts about that because I hardly ever get the chance to talk to somebody about such a profound thing as life and death in that way. You contemplated -- I don't mean contemplate suicide -- but do you contemplate the idea of suicide?

JA: No, not me, I never got myself into that position. But in my mother's case, like me, I could take a lot of, what you call crap, from anybody and I used to hand it right back to them. So I was very strong physically, so if somebody says something, I just turned around and I just give them a dirty look and they just back off. But in my mother's case, it was the Issei who constantly, "Hey, your son's a draft evader, coward, chicken shit," and kept pressing, and cut her off, cut her off, cut her off. And there's only one family, Uchida, that communicated with her. All the rest of the Japanese community kind of cut her off, just isolated her.

AH: Here in Seattle?

JA: In Seattle, back here in Seattle. And it was almost like that about the time when all this reactivation of Selective Service and what I was going to do. But I want to get back to this Selective Service where I had the talk with Min Yasui. I want to get back to it -- remind me.

AH: Oh, I'm going to spend a lot of time on that, you bet. Okay, go ahead.

JA: But anyway, the Japanese Issei community cut her off, very cold. And then she used to go to church and she used to be just like a janitor. And one day, this Reverend, Reverend Oda -- this was at Nichiren Church -- from the pew he said, "There's a very educated woman who does all the toilet cleaning and you people use it and you don't know about it." But anyway, people figured who it was and they resented and they told her, "Get out, we don't want you here."

AH: The parishioners told her that?

JA: Yeah, so finally she came back, and there's no place for her to go. So she stayed in this one small dingy room and she was just... at the beginning she says, "I can't go anywhere, I can't even go to church." And she sat there, and whatever she was thinking, and that is what led her to committing suicide. But not... she started and she ended up in the Harborview Hospital where she strangled herself. And, you know, the terrible thing was, the night or the day it happened, I heard about that. But the nurse, we were having a kind of a mushroom bake or wiener roast at Alki, and this woman came, and said, and explained how she committed suicide.

AH: She explained to who?

JA: To the whole group.

AH: Really? And you were there?

JA: And I was there and this one... there was a couple of 'em who were nurses at same place, they tried to keep her down, to say that, "Jim is here." And no, she couldn't, she had to blurb the whole thing out, over and over and that's where I found out how she killed herself.

AH: Even when people were trying to tell her that you were there, and then she just kept going on in front of all these people?

JA: Right, and that's the kind of attitude I had to come up through. I was strong enough and I could take that, but my mother, on the other hand, she wasn't, you know, mentally that strong.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.